


collision course

by autoclaves



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, F/M, Introspection, Unhealthy Relationships, references to missy and simm!master
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23059654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: The worst part of himself may be terrible beyond comprehension, but the worst part of her has always been him.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 84





	collision course

**Author's Note:**

> i went insane and wrote this at 3am instead of studying for my chinese oral. let's go thoschei shippers we're putting on our clown shoes again 🤡
> 
> the quote at the beginning is from richard siken's saying your names - i still can't believe how well it fits this story.

_Names like pain cries, names_

_like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented,_

_names forbidden or overused. Your name like_

_a song I sing to myself, your name like a box_

_where I keep my love—_

She has golden hair again this time, pale and shining like it’s been lit up from the inside. It falls everywhere: into her face when she’s concentrating, strands flying wild in the wind as she runs, the back all ruffled up despite her attempts to push it back down. It’s almost endearing, how insistently contrary her hair is. 

Hers is not the only new body. This body of his is unfamiliar still, a stiffly-worn costume, and it craves with a bright desperation. The craving—it’s a constant thing with too many mouths attached to too many heads, all push-pulling at him like he’s running at terminal velocity. 

The drums beat on, tireless, outliving every body he’s been in. (It settles, when it’s near her. She’s the only living being that ever made it better.)

 _Every star in the universe. I’m going to see them with you._ And instead it comes down to this, wherein he starts fires and she puts them out.

Time Lords aren’t supposed to love like this. Maybe that’s why they do it, their awful dance with the fires. She runs and he runs and eventually they take turns trading off the responsibility of arsonist. _Collateral damage. It’s our Paris._

She’s never admitted it to be love in any lifetime, and she is, as always, half-right. (There was once when the Doctor had begged him while he died, kneeling on the floor of the ship that had nearly killed him, and the expression on his face made him think, _maybe_ . _Maybe_ . But then he’d died, and the Doctor, well. He’d just have to assume the Doctor lived, as always.) There’s no human construct for the history between them. It’s too great and too terrible and too _much,_ for the understanding of one mortal lifespan. But at least he has no qualms about naming it what it is. At least he acknowledges the worst of himself, the parts too terrible for comprehension, without flinching. Her solution was always to run. Time Lords aren’t meant to love at all, really. They’re not built to, not the way human bodies are. Two hearts and both of them cold as space. (Throw a man into space and it will not forgive. It simply _is,_ undemanding and uncaring.)

Gallifrey, though. Gallifrey burns warm, always, always. The consequence of veering too close to its binary suns during the first stages of the Exploration Era, and although the planet’s course has long-since been reset now, the surface is acrid and pockmarked. A reminder. A cautionary tale. He remembers the orange sky, the rolling landscape filled in with waves of scarlet and copper and every burnished shade of red-gold imaginable. The Doctor, back before she had rebirthed herself as the Doctor—she’d try to name them all, giving them silly names and beautiful names and whispered names and shouted ones. Names that meant something and names that meant nothing at all. He scythes them over his tongue now; they still taste like the metal-dry air of Gallifrey.

If you looked off into the distance at the right angle, all that violent color made it seem like the horizon was on fire. The cruelest optical illusion, because then it was. It really was on fire, and it had been his doing.

_Look upon my work, Doctor, and despair._

The worst part of himself may be terrible beyond comprehension, but the worst part of her has always been him. 

_Master,_ she’d said. After she’d found out, and before, too, that first time when he’d bared his teeth and told her to kneel. To name a thing means to believe in it—he names her as often as he can, in every single body. A repeating litany of _Doctor,_ _Doctor,_ _Doctor,_ _Doctor._

(Doctor who? Doctor who indeed. Doctor, meaning healer. Doctor, meaning she who runs away with her blue box and saves people in that self-assured way of hers; maybe it’s to assuage the guilt that the first person she had saved had grown up to be a monster. See, he has no compunctions about owning up to it. To name a thing is to believe in it. To name a monster is to render it real. She’d had as much of a hand in his becoming as he himself did.)

 _Doctor,_ _Doctor,_ _Doctor,_ _Doctor._ One-two-three-four-one-two-three-four _-_ _onetwothreefour_ in counterpoint with his heartbeats, on and on like a relentless, nameless thing.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


End file.
